FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT SPORTS NIGHT - PAGE 2

"Just Shoot Me," etc.: More new television Tuesday night as the season gets under way in earnest this week. Returning is "Just Shoot Me," the David Spade comedy now in the 8 p.m. spot (WMAQ-Ch. 5) vacated by "Frasier," in a year that will test whether it belongs among the elite. Its relentlessly entertaining debut finds it moving closer, with some razor-sharp dialogue -- "When you tilt your head to the side, does it sound like a rainstick?" -- and enough giddy surprises to get you past the few formulaic moments.

"Felicity": Lovers of Hollywood intrigue, hypocrisy and scamming will want to catch this episode of the new WB teen drama (8 p.m., WGN-Ch. 9). It is cowritten and has a role played by Riley Weston, quite possibly the first person in Tinseltown history to be excoriated, rather than celebrated, for lying about her age. Weston, you may know, is the former writer for the show who caused a scandale when a jealous acquaintance revealed she was not the...

"60 Minutes II": In what sounds like a strong broadcast, the junior partner in the "60 Minutes" firm devotes the entire hour to an Ed Bradley-led look at the AIDS crisis in Africa. Entitled "Death by Denial," the documentary (8 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2) finds a tableau of denial, indifference, ignorance and corporate irresponsibility on the continent and, he says, the potential to lose an African generation. Bradley challenges to his face the unorthodox (and scientifically suspect)

Wednesday grab bag: It's the middle of the February sweeps period, and programmers are pulling out all the stops. On a very special "Barney & Friends" (5 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11), the purple dinosaur sings hectoring lyrics over a well-known melody, accompanied by child actors trying way too hard to look cute and interested. On "Dateline NBC" (7 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5) and "20/20" (9 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7), planned segments include correspondents' discovering shocking truths about aspects of life involving sex (drugs slipped in drinks, "20/20")

Next up, perhaps, in Comedy Central's stable of news-parody shows: a satirical take on the likes of ESPN's "SportsCenter." The Chicago-based Onion will produce a half-hour pilot making fun of sports and sports news, Onion CEO Steve Hannah said Thursday. The show will amplify the approach of the online video site Onion Sports Network, which features such stories as "a touching piece on the first openly gay horse to run in the Breeders' Cup or the Yankees building a summer stadium in the Hamptons," said Hannah.

- As a big "Sports Night" fan, I have noticed that Peter Krause (Casey) is on "Six Feet Under" and Joshua Malina (Jeremy) has joined "The West Wing," but what about the four other main cast members? --Sandi Drecksage, Phoenix. In brief: Felicity Huffman (Dana) stars in Showtime's new limited series "Out of Order," which premieres Sunday, June 1, and she is currently working on the movie comedy-drama "Raising Helen." Josh Charles (Dan) appears in this summer's action film "S.W.A.

- It's unusual to see a music star serving as host of a non-musical television series, as Melissa Etheridge does on the current Lifetime show "Beyond Chance." Why did she decide to do it? The way she has been explaining it, she likes the theme of the program, which suggests that unexpected twists of fate can affect people's lives in positive ways. Also, the production schedule for the show doesn't interfere with Etheridge's successful career as a singer-songwriter. In fact, she has continued to tour while "Beyond Chance" has been in production, having done so recently in support of her album "Breakdown" (which has yielded the single "Angels Will Fall")

"Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course": Left coast binary age chronicler Bob Cringely attempts in this half-hour PBS special to bring viewers up to speed on the mysterious alleged wonders of digital television. He's offering up some pretty basic concepts -- movie-style screen ratio, more visual information per square inch of screen, the capacity to carry supplementary information on one channel -- but if you've read nothing about the digital tube this program (9:30 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11)

QUESTIONS 1) "Playmakers," ESPN's first scripted series, debuting Tuesday, stars Omar Gooding as a gridiron star. Omar's brother, Cuba Gooding Jr., won an Oscar for a similar role in what 1996 movie comedy? 2) "Good Sports," a short-lived 1991 CBS sitcom, featured what real-life couple as a pair of bickering co-anchors of a TV show called "Sports Central"? 3) Which "Designing Women" star played an unlikely football team owner in the raunchy HBO comedy "1st and Ten"? 4)